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Hey! You're looking at the front page of recorder.sayforward.com which is a temporary storage place for articles I didn't read/evaluate yet. I also use this platform to prepare new content to post sayforward.com where audio/video/image material is hosted completely on my server. On the recorder instead, media is loaded from external sources, so don't get mad if some of them don't work anymore.

Please note that the content posted here is explicitly intended to help me remember certain things, i.e. it is not intended to entertain you in any way (although you certainly will find stuff that fulfills this criteria).

Math, Programming, and Language Learning: An anonymous reader writes: There’s often debate amongst modern programmers about how much math a professional developer should know, and to what extent programming is math. Learning to program is often viewed as being on a spectrum between learning math and learning spoken/written languages. But in a new article, Jeremy Kun argues that the spectrum should be formulated another way: Human language -> Mathematics -> Programming. “Having studied all three subjects, I’d argue that mathematics falls between language and programming on the hierarchy of rigor. … [T]he hierarchy of abstraction is the exact reverse, with programming being the most concrete and language being the most abstract. Perhaps this is why people consider mathematics a bridge between human language and programming. Because it allows you to express more formal ideas in a more concrete language, without making you worry about such specific hardware details like whether your integers are capped at 32 bits or 64. Indeed, if you think that the core of programming is expressing abstract ideas in a concrete language, then this makes a lot of sense. This is precisely why learning mathematics is ‘better’ at helping you learn the kind of abstract thinking you want for programming than language. Because mathematics is closer to programming on the hierarchy. It helps even more that mathematics and programming readily share topics.”

Art in games must not be selfish. Game art must be done in a quality level, but cannot be in a level where it distracts the player from the game play itself. Although most games made do realize the concepts described above, some games dont realize that i via Gamasutra.com - All Blogs

January this year our FPS game Verdun was suffering from a lot of network traffic. By implementing simple network culling we were able to reduce traffic by 50%. This post details how we implemented this in Photon Unity Networking (90% client-side). via Gamasutra.com - All Blogs

Since its June 25 release, the game ranked as high as second in the most-downloaded free-apps category, is the only title among the top 10 in the App Store with a five-star rating, and shares of the game’s creator — Glu Mobile Inc. — have gone up 42%.

“It might be our biggest game of the year,” CEO Niccolo de Masi said in an interview. “We’re not surprised. Kim is a one-of-a-kind talent with an incredibly precise fit to the game engine that we tailored but already had in the company.”

Bloomberg reports that the Kardashian game “takes users inside Hollywood, guided by a virtual Kim who offers advice on how to become an A-list celebrity, starting from the so-called E-list.”

One of Mrs. Kanye West’s helpful tips? “Dating famous people will get you more fans, too.”

“While the game is free to play, the goal is to get users hooked on in-app purchases such as clothing or a burst of energy needed for traipsing through Hollywood,” according to Bloomberg. “Users can spend as much as $99.99 for 175,000 virtual dollars. A trip to Beverly Hills costs 4 game ‘dollars,’ while 400 will buy a necklace.”

Watch a trailer for the game below:

"This project has been an amazing experience," Kim told E! News on Monday. “I’m so excited that people are enjoying the game!”

Kardashian added, “I partnered last year with a fantastic company called Glu Mobile to create what is now the No. 3 Free and No. 5 Grossing game on the Apple App Store. We collaborated on every aspect of the game’s design details and continue to do so with the updates we are bringing out.”

While the game could be Kardashian’s most lucrative deal ever, it’s not like she needs the money. The E! reality star — whose empire includes clothing, jewelry, and cosmetics — earned $28 million in the past year, Forbes estimated.

Graphic artist Micaël Reynaud has been making a name for himself lately by playing with the technical limitations of the GIF, creating looped studies of perspective and motion that are unlike anything you’ve likely seen before.

“You just can’t have it all” is a phrase that most of us are accustomed to hearing and that many still believe to be true when discussing the speed, scale and cost of processing data. To reach high speed data processing, it is necessary to utilize more memory resources which increases cost. This occurs because price increases as memory, on average, tends to be more expensive than commodity disk drive. The idea of data systems being unable to reliably provide you with both memory and fast access—not to mention at the right cost—has long been debated, though the idea of such limitations was cemented by computer scientist, Eric Brewer, who introduced us to the CAP theorem.

Writing a URL shortner that works is easy, says Sean, writing one that scales and is highly available, is not so easy.

Bitly doesn’t make money with a Shortening as a Service service, bitly makes money on an analytics product that mashes URL click data with with data they crawl from the web to help customers understand what people are paying attention to on the web.

Analytics products began as a backend service that crawled web server logs. Logs contained data from annotated links along with cookie data to indicate where on a page a link was clicked, who clicked it, what the link was, etc. But the links all went back to the domain of the web site. The idea of making links go to a different domain than your own so that a 3rd party can do the analytics is a scary proposition, but it’s also kind of genius.

While this talk is not on bitly’s architecture, it is a thoughtful exploration on the nature of distributed systems and how you can solve bigger than one box problems with them.

Duke Engines demonstrate a new kind of internal combustion engine, based on a crazy, hypnotic, rotary system. I lack the mechanical engineering chops to know whether this is any good, but it’s fun to watch.
(via Sploid) via Boing Boing

What went right and what went wrong with “Causality - Classic Puzzle Game Reimagined”, an iOS remake of the classic puzzle game, “Lights Out”. Download and revenue data is also shared in this article. via Gamasutra.com - All Blogs

One of the most remarkable aspects about the Japanese arcade scene is that it still exists. Perhaps it’s because organised criminals loves to launder their money through arcades and pachinko parlours, or perhaps it’s just down to the reality that people still want to play games there.

More so than online gaming, arcade multiplayer is an intimate, rewarding experience. People are civil, you don’t have to contend with input lag - if you mess up it’s your fault, and not that of dodgy net code, and when things do go awry players are less likely to let off strings of expletives in public. Thanks to this intimacy, groups of players congregate into little communities. On a purely anthropological level, it’s actually rather fascinating.

The games and communities that endure are almost always those that have a solid multiplayer game at their centre. Traditionally these focal points of interest were the classic beat ‘em-ups of old - your Street Fighters or your King of Fighters - but over the last decade or so a new entry has managed to create similar fervor.

Video: Emergent behavior, behavior unplanned and unanticipated by the designer, is a large part of what you’re looking for in playtesting. But depending on who you are, game designer, puzzle designer, game writer, you treat emergence in different ways. via Gamasutra.com - All Blogs

Back in 1984, a young Bill Murray starred in Ghostbusters and took on a role in another film, the dystopic sci-fi comedy Nothing Losts Forever. You’ve probably watched Ghostbusters, but not the latter – Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer binned the film, reportedly out of concerns over how to market its release. The film has only ever been screened at a few festivals over the decades. Now you can watch it in all its glory on…

BundesSans and BundesSerif — truly democratic typefaces: Three years ago MetaDesign Berlin asked us to design a custom Serif and Sans typeface for the German federal government. They had been assigned to redevelop the government’s corporate design with the typefaces as part of the update. The project was to cover all communication issued by the government and their ministries, online or offline, […]

For the F2P model to work, gameplay has to be diluted, or segmented, before it reaches players. This is acceptable to some audiences, but anathema to others. There is another viable model: developers needn’t leave money on the table to compete with F2P. via Gamasutra.com - All Blogs

This is a guest post by Elizabeth Osterloh and Tobias Wilke of cloudControl.

Startups face very different issues than big companies when they build software. Larger companies develop projects over much longer time frames and often have entire IT-departments to support them in creating customized architecture. It’s an entirely different story when a startup has a good idea, it gets popular, and they need to scale fast.

This was the situation for Gambify, an app for organizing betting games released just in time for the soccer World Cup. The company was founded and is run in Germany by only two people. When they managed to get a few major endorsements (including Adidas and the German team star Thomas Müller), they had to prepare for a sudden deluge of users, as well as very specific peak times.

The World's Best Living Programmers: itwbennett (1594911) writes “How do you measure success? If it’s by Stack Overflow reputation, Google engineer Jon Skeet is the world’s best programmer. If it’s winning programming competitions, Gennady Korotkevich or Petr Mitrechev might be your pick. But what about Linus Torvalds? Or Richard Stallman? Or Donald Knuth? ITworld’s Phil Johnson has rounded up a list of what just might be the world’s top 14 programmers alive today.”

Challenge is an undervalued element of gaming. Learning to embrace challenge is a missing aspect of our modern gaming culture. In my opinion, the aversion to challenge is more than a game issue—it is a cultural issue that needs some attention. via Gamasutra.com - All Blogs

Padding out games is a popular strategy for trying to teach new players how to play at the expense of the experts. Today’s post examines some of the ways of creating a refined experience instead of a bloated one. via Gamasutra.com - All Blogs

A Google employee has written a post about what it’s like working at the company.

At his blog, Apenwarr, Google Fiber engineer Avery Pennarun is largely complimentary of Google and its employees: “I continue to be amazed at the overall smartness of people at this place. Overall, very nearly everybody, across the board, surprises or impresses me with how smart they are.”

However, Pennarun says, “Smart people have a problem, especially (although not only) when you put them in large groups. That problem is an ability to convincingly rationalize nearly anything.”

Because smart people, especially computer-oriented smart people, tend to be logic oriented, they always find a rationale to support any conclusion. They also tend to avoid the chaotic, random, messy reality of the world where results don’t fit neatly into logically rational outcomes, says Pennarun.

This leads to misguided beliefs later in life. At Google, for instance, projects can be easily rationalized:

Working at a large, successful company lets you keep your isolation. If you choose, you can just ignore all the inconvenient facts about the world. You can make decisions based on whatever input you choose. The success or failure of your project in the market is not really that important; what’s important is whether it gets canceled or not, a decision which is at the whim of your boss’s boss’s boss’s boss, who, as your only link to the unpleasantly unpredictable outside world, seems to choose projects quasi-randomly, and certainly without regard to the quality of your contribution.

It’s a setup that makes it very easy to describe all your successes (project not canceled) in terms of your team’s greatness, and all your failures (project canceled) in terms of other people’s capriciousness. End users and profitability, for example, rarely enter into it. This project isn’t supposed to be profitable; we benefit whenever people spend more time online. This project doesn’t need to be profitable; we can use it to get more user data. Users are unhappy, but that’s just because they’re change averse. And so on.

As a result, Pennarum says people at Google are cursed with overconfidence. Because they’ve been so successful in life, they believe everything they do is successful and deserves a positive outcome.

In fact, he says, “one of the biggest social problems currently reported at work is lack of confidence, also known as Impostor Syndrome.” The Impostor Syndrome hits people who aren’t quite as convinced that everything in the world is logical and therefore have a harder time rationalizing.

Pennarun says these people are valuable. “Impostor Syndrome is that voice inside you saying that not everything is as it seems, and it could all be lost in a moment. The people with the problem are the people who can’t hear that voice.”

Krebs on Security (via Gizmodo)has the latest on super-small ATM “skimmers” — small devices that nefarious criminals attach to the mouth of an ATM that capture your credit or debit information when you swipe your card — and they’re only getting more advanced and harder to detect.

A new report from the European ATM Security Team outlines the rise of mini-skimmers, which actually sit inside the “throat” of at ATM, stealing data all day long while totally out of view.

One such skimmer, pictured below, works in cooperation with a tiny camera pointed at an ATM’s keypad. You swipe your card, the skimmer has your data. You enter your PIN, the camera captures you pushing the buttons. It’s totally vile, but it works.

Here’s the camera setup — the device itself is pictured left, and its false cover leaves it in prime position on the ATM (pictured right) to scope your PIN number.

Often these skimmers will be powered by a mobile phone that transmits captured data via text message. They might also be facilitated by an MP3 player that stores data as sound, which can later be converted back to card data.

Mighty Tactical Shooter was my favourite game of Rezzed this time around. The concept is simple and brilliant – a turn-based side-scrolling space shooter in the mould of R-Type. I feel like there may be an alternate dimension in which ‘turn-based’ came to dominate gaming in the way that ‘procedural’ is. We’d have turn-based racing […] via Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The Fast Follow strategy in mobile F2P games is in danger due to several key factors a) skyrocketing CPA, b) app store surfacing issues c) emerging new curation channels and d) major publishers as gatekeepers. via Gamasutra.com - All Blogs

SIGGRAPH has announced the winners of its 41st annual Computer Animation Festival. These projects will be shown amongst more than 100 pieces at the 2014 conference that will take place August 10-14 in Vancouver, Canada. via Cartoon Brew